I was at Taman Jurong Greens Neighbourhood Park early this morning to attend the award presentation ceremony for the winners for ShowGarden @ South West Competition. During the ceremony, the three judges for the competition, Ms Rosalind Tan, Mr Mohd Azmi Shahbudin and me received a pot of miniature rose each as a token of appreciation.
From left, Rosalind, Azmi, Mr Tharman (Guest of Honour), Dr Amy Khor (Mayor Southwest CDC) and myself.
Besides presenting awards and tokens of appreciation to representatives from winning community gardens and judges respectively, the event which was graced by Singapore’s Finance Minister and Member of Parliament for Jurong GRC, Mr Tharman Shanmugaratnam, also marked the launch of the 1 million Native Plants @ South West project, as well as, a tree-planting exercise.
Launch of the 1 million Native Plants @ South West project on stage.
The month of November is Singapore’s Clean and Green Singapore campaign, which aims to inspire Singaporeans to care for and protect our living environment by adopting an environmentally-friendly lifestyle. One of the main activities that is always organised at this time of the year is the planting of trees. The island-wide planting of trees was started in 1963 by the Singapore government with the objective of making Singapore a green city.
Before the entire event started, I was walking around the park and I was quite surprised to see quite a handful of Garcinia tree species were being prepared to planted by various community groups and the guest-of-honour. Garcinia is the genus of plants that the mangosteen belongs to. During my walk, I got to meet up with Mr S. K. Ganesan who is the Assitant Director from the Landscaping and Arboriculture Branch in the Streetscape Division of the National Parks Board (NParks) who was there early in the morning to oversee the preparation and planting of the trees.
Staff from Alexandra Hospital, together with Rosalind (standing, fourth from left), posing for a photograph after planting a mangosteen tree.
I am grateful to Mr Ganesan who spent some time with me to introduce to me the six species of Garcinia trees, namely, true mangosteen (G. mangostana), button mangosteen (G. prainiana), asam gelugor (G. artoviridis), seashore mangosteen (G. hombroniana), G. griffithii and G. eugeniaefolia that he has helped to source for the park. I have learnt alot from him.
The trees that I saw were relatively healthy and this was the first time that I saw with my own eyes the button mangosteen, seashore mangosteen, G. griffithii and G. eugeniaefolia. It was an eye-opener for me. Healthy individuals of these rather slow-growing mangosteen relatives are generally quite hard to come by and I hope the residents living nearby the Taman Jurong Greens Neighbourhood Park will be able to appreciate the presence of these trees in their living environment.
Many thanks to Mr Tan Wee Lee for giving me the permission to use his photograhs on this blog post.
